Why does a leader's mind keep running to the worst case?
Mostly because a vivid picture beats a number. In 1978, Sarah Lichtenstein, Paul Slovic and their colleagues asked people how often different causes of death happen. People overestimated the rare causes and underestimated the common ones. The researchers traced the errors to exposure, memorability and imagination, and when people were told to avoid those biases, they couldn't. A rare attack in a crowded room is a picture I can run frame by frame, and the drive to church isn't. The vivid thing got my attention, and the common thing got none.
The legal scholar Cass Sunstein, then at the University of Chicago, studied the related effect. His 2002 Yale Law Journal essay opens with a New York Times report from the weeks after September 11: many people were forswearing air travel and buying gas masks and radiation detectors. His thesis is that when intense emotions are engaged, people tend to focus on the adverse outcome, not on its likelihood. In his words, people "do not give sufficient consideration to the likelihood that the worst case will actually occur." He calls it probability neglect, and for an individual he says it produces "excessive worry and unjustified behavioral changes." That was my Sunday. The picture was vivid enough that "how likely is this?" never came up until I caught it.
Easter's sentence points toward a second effect, and it matters if your company has had a quiet year. The closest match I found doesn't test his theory directly. In 2018, David Levari, Daniel Gilbert and colleagues reported in Science that when the thing people were looking for became rare, they widened their definition of it. When blue dots became rare, people began calling purple dots blue. When threatening faces became rare, people began to see neutral faces as threatening, and when unethical requests became rare, innocuous requests began to look unethical. Warning people didn't stop it, and neither did telling them to stay consistent and paying them to do it. Their experiments were lab tasks with Harvard students, so taking it into a company is my extension, not their finding. Still, picture a company coming off a quiet year. A late shipment or one sharp customer email gets a meeting it would never have rated in a bad year. Nothing got worse, but the bar moved.
Knowing about the bias, and being told to resist it, didn't remove it in either set of studies. Good intentions are a weak defense. A short procedure you run on purpose is stronger.
How do you size a fear?
You find the number first. For my Sunday, I used the FBI's own count of rare attacks like that one. From 2021 through 2025, the FBI recorded 217 of them in the United States, and 382 people were killed.
The FBI doesn't publish odds, so this is our math, not theirs. By our calculation on the FBI's 2021 through 2025 counts, 382 deaths over five years spread across the U.S. population, the chance works out to about 1 in 4.5 million in a given year and about 1 in 57,000 over a lifetime. Other counts run higher because they use wider definitions. For scale, the National Safety Council's "Odds of Dying" page puts the lifetime odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash at about 1 in 100 (1 in 101), based on 2024 data. Next to our figure, a lifetime on the road carries more than 500 times the risk.
I drove to church that Sunday, and the drive was the bigger risk, one my mind never noticed.
Every one of those numbers is a person. Odds describe a country, and they say nothing to the people on the wrong end of them. The point is not that the fear is silly. The point is where my attention should go.
What does misplaced fear cost a leader?
Sunstein's opening scene has a price tag, and the risk researcher Gerd Gigerenzer put a number on it. After September 11, many Americans flew less and drove more. In a 2006 paper in Risk Analysis, he estimated that nearly 1,600 additional Americans died on the road in the year that followed. That is a modeled estimate from traffic data, not a count of individual deaths, but the lesson holds: the fear went to the vivid risk, and the ordinary one did the damage.
In a company the cost is smaller and the shape is the same. Attention goes to the vivid risk while the ordinary one goes unwatched.
Does your team catch your fear?
Misplaced fear does not stay in one head. Your team reads your state before it hears your words. In 2002, Sigal Barsade ran a study in which a trained actor sat in each group with a pleasant or unpleasant mood. Group members' moods moved with the actor's, and the groups that caught the good mood cooperated more and argued less. In 2005, Thomas Sy, Stéphane Côté and Richard Saavedra tested the leader's mood directly. Groups with a leader in a bad mood felt more negative and coordinated worse. Both studies used students in lab groups, not executives.
My Sunday had the same shape. My wife was standing right next to me. State is shared, so the first job in a high-pressure room is yours, and it comes before the first slide. When you're the person the board looks to, the fear you carry is the fear you hand out.
Isn't it irresponsible not to plan for the worst?
It would be, and preparing is part of leading well. Wanting to protect my wife is a good instinct, and knowing where the exits are is a habit I picked up from people who run toward danger for a living.
The difference is how the thinking starts. Noting the exits once, calmly, when I walk into a room is preparation. A full scenario that starts running by itself in the middle of worship, before anyone has asked how likely it is, is my mind hunting. The first one serves me. The second one runs me.
The Fear Check in three steps
1. Say it. I put the threat in one plain sentence. Mine was a rare attack, in a crowded room. A sentence can be checked, and a picture can't.
2. Size it. I find one number from a source with no reason to scare me, and set it next to a risk I already take without a second thought. In a company, that source is your own data, like the retention report, the pipeline or the incident log, not the loudest voice in the meeting. If you can't find a number, you are still working from a picture, so finding one comes before acting.
3. Steer it. Hands open. It works like the safety briefing before a flight. Where are the exits? What's my responsibility? Check. Now, engage in the moment, and let your attention go back to what matters. If the number says rare, that quick check is all the fear gets. If the number says real and large, prepare once, calmly, and let the plan stand.
Why hands. The hands are how you run that third step in the moment. A clenched fist is closing up, so I coach clients to turn their hands over, palms up and open, and leave them there while they run the check. Marsha Linehan teaches it in dialectical behavior therapy as willing hands, and her handout describes unclenching the hands and turning the palms up with the fingers relaxed. That one comes from clinical practice and my own coaching, not from a lab, and I found no study that tests palms-up hands on their own, so I offer it as a coaching practice, not a proven fix.
My Sunday, start to finish. Say it: a rare attack, in a crowded room. Size it: about 1 in 57,000 over a lifetime (our math on the FBI's 2021 through 2025 counts), against about 1 in 100 (1 in 101) for dying in a car crash (National Safety Council, 2024 data). Steer it: hands open, where are the exits? What's my responsibility? Check. Now, engage in the moment.
A made-up example with nobody real in it. It's the night before a board presentation, and a leader keeps rehearsing one hostile question that probably won't come. Say it: a director is going to ask the hard one, and I'll freeze. Size it: how many board meetings in the last two years actually included a question like that? Check your own record. Steer it: prepare one answer, once, calmly. Then walk in with your hands open, and if the hard question does land, leave them open and put your attention on everyone at the table. Braced, you wait for one question. Present, you hear everyone at the table.
Catching it that Sunday was the skill. The Fear Check gives that skill steps. The goal isn't less fear. It's fear pointed at what's real. The next time a fear takes over your week, say it, size it, steer it, and then get back to the work that matters. The next time your mind starts planning for the worst, ask one question first: Is this fear worth my attention?